JOHNSON: So, Mr. President, while I can’t advise policy decisions, we may never get an opportunity to reach Osama bin Laden like this again…

PRESIDENT CLINTON: (strokes chin, bites lip) This is truly an important opportunity. But what about collateral damage?

JOHNSON: With all due respect, sir, this is no time to be such a mincing nancy-boy.

(ALL) What?

JOHNSON: Look, I’m Larry Johnson, people. If you disagree with me, it’s obviously because you’re a little light in the wingtips for this terrorist, and this is no time to go all friend-o’-Dorothy on me.

A commenter asks what I think of “yesterday’s 5-4 supreme court decision dispensing with the requirement of knocking before executing a search warrant.”

Well, the first thing I think of it is that it did no such thing.

The decision makes no change to the rule that the Constitution generally requires police officers to knock and announce their presence before entry. It simply holds that, if officers violate that rule, the remedies available to the homeowner do not include the suppression of relevant evidence at a criminal trial.

The “knock and announce” rule is still in place. Since police officers don’t like to be sued, I think that they will continue to knock and announce. When they believe that doing so will pose a problem of officer safety or destruction of evidence, they will ask for a judge to authorize a “no-knock” warrant — something they already had the right to do.

All the decision means is that I won’t have to hold hearings about whether the cops waited 10 seconds or 20. I think it’s a good ruling. But then, I’m not a big fan of the exclusionary rule to begin with.

Pattt Morrison, in a column about the job prospects of Californians with criminal records, makes the following ludicrous statement:

One Californian in five has a criminal record (in no small part because the “war on drugs” has been cramming prisons with first-time offenders).

That’s just a bunch of baloney. To put it kindly.

California prisons are mostly assuredly not crammed with first-time drug offenders. Morrison has no basis for that statement. It’s something she says because all her friends say it, and Morrison thinks it sounds good.